Volume 43  Issue 1  January 2019

In This Issue...

Worldwide, the new year starts with grim reminders of social suffering and political domination. What is the role of urban research and theory in such a world? This collection of articles suggests that it is the analysis of frontiers of capitalist predation, be it the ‘lifeless dwellings’ produced by the global super-rich (Atkinson), or the ‘technosphere’ of restless global capital (Lin), or the making of ‘fungible space’ for global logistics (Danyluk). As Anguelovski argues, such frontiers include ‘green infrastructure planning’ and other forms of climate change interventions. Doshi thus reminds us of how displacement takes place in the name of improvement and under the sign of postcolonial development. In such a world, forms of inclusion can also become the means of displacement, as Vidal shows in the case of housing cooperatives. The tools of resistance, Dozier demonstrates, can creatively appropriate the ‘right to property’ and thus contest urban development, but they also engender new rounds of reform and control.

There are methodological challenges at stake in the study of worldwide processes of urban transformation. As Connolly shows, a vibrant debate is underway in urban studies as to whether the conceptual framework of planetary urbanization can capture the ‘metabolisms and circulations’ that make up a lived world and its ontological multiplicity. Kobi’s essay on ‘locality, materiality, and territoriality’ reminds us that even ‘construction sites [that] have been emerging everywhere’ have historical and political specificity. Indeed, the question of history, and of the historical method, is central to this issue of IJURR. By emphasizing the long histories of capital and empire, Boodrookas and Keshavarzian resignify Persian Gulf cities ‘not as an eclectic sideshow but as a central site for global shifts in urbanism, capitalism and architecture in the twentieth century’. Blatman-Thomas and Porter locate the urban, and key categories such as property, in racial capitalism, specifically settler colonial cities. They demonstrate that attention to settler-colonialism, consigned to critical race studies and postcolonial theory, is a foundational methodology for urban studies.

— Ananya Roy

Articles

Necrotecture: Lifeless Dwellings and London’s Super‐Rich

The Forever Frontier of Urbanism: Historicizing Persian Gulf Cities

Placing Property: Theorizing the Urban from Settler Colonial Cities

Constructing Cityscapes: Locality, Materiality and Territoriality on the Urban Construction Site in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Northwest China

Urban Political Ecology Beyond Methodological Cityism

Infrastructure’s Expenditures: Changi Airport, Food Cargo and Capital’s Technosphere

Fungible Space: Competition and Volatility in the Global Logistics Network

Greening Displacements, Displacing Green: Environmental Subjectivity, Slum Clearance, and the Embodied Political Ecologies of Dispossession in Mumbai

Grabbed Urban Landscapes: Socio‐spatial Tensions in Green Infrastructure Planning in Medellín

Cooperative Islands in Capitalist Waters: Limited‐equity Housing Cooperatives, Urban Renewal and Gentrification

Contested Development: Homeless Property, Police Reform, and Resistance in Skid Row, LA

Book Reviews

Phil Hubbard 2017: The Battle for the High Street: Retail Gentrification, Class and Disgust. London: Palgrave MacmillanSara González (ed.) 2018: Contested Markets, Contested Cities: Gentrification and Urban Justice in Retail Spaces. Abingdon: Routledge

Miriam Greenberg and Penny Lewis (eds.) 2017: The City is the Factory: New Solidarities and Spatial Strategies in an Urban Age. Ithaca, NY: Cornwell University Press

AbdouMaliq Simone and Edgar Pieterse 2017: New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times. Cambridge: Polity Press

Winifred Curran 2018: Gender and Gentrification. New York: Routledge

Melody L. Hoffmann 2016: Bike Lanes are White Lanes: Bicycle Advocacy and Urban Planning. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press

Marie Cartier, Isabelle Coutant, Olivier Masclet and Yasmine Siblot 2016: The France of the Little‐middles. A Suburban Housing Development in Greater Paris. New York and Oxford: Berghahn

Jaime A. Alves 2018: The Anti‐black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

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